I'm starting to realize that Laudna's story, completely by accident, functions really well as a metaphor for Jewish pogrom survivors.
You live your whole life on the outskirts of a big city. There's something about you that makes you different, something you didn't choose and don't have a say in, and everyone around you thinks you're a freak, an "other," and tries to drive you away.
When you're a little older, the seat of power in your city changes hands. You barely notice at first, you have bigger things to worry about, but your family hopes that maybe these new rulers will present new opportunities for you, that you won't be thought of as an "other" anymore.
Until one day the other shoe drops. The new rulers find you, and they don't accept you. They hurt you and humiliate you and mutilate you and when you finally die your corpse is strung up on a tree as a message.
When it's over, you're all that's left. Your family is dead, buried in a shallow unmarked grave somewhere. No one will even look at you. You can't go back home, your home is gone, everything you ever knew is gone, and no one is willing to help you get it back. So you leave.
You build a life for yourself, away from home. You find new friends, new family, who don't think you're a freak. They love you because of what makes you different, rather than in spite of it.
But even then, you can't escape the whispers. The reminders that you're not like them, not really. That you're not really a person, that you're something else, and you shouldn't bother pretending to be a person when you'll never be anything but a freak.
You hate the whispers, but you can't get rid of it. So you live with it. You ignore them when you can, and you laugh at them when you can't, and you try to live your life.
Until one day the violence comes back. You're hurt again. For the second time, your life ends.
You don't know what to do, so you go back home. And at first when you get back it's wonderful. The rulers who destroyed your family were ousted, replaced with someone new, someone everyone says is better. So you go to him and tell him your story, about how the last rulers destroyed everything you had. The new rulers are sympathetic. They suffered under the old rulers too, they understand your pain. So you ask for their help in setting everything right. They hate the old rulers as much as you do, more even, so they should want to help, they should want to repair what the old rulers broke, right?
They get very uncomfortable at that. Start talking about the natural order, how this is a really complicated decision, how they have to think about their own safety. If they help you, if they fix what was broken, it could have unknown repercussions. The past needs to stay in the past. You're part of that past. You need to stay in the past too.
You stay in the city for a few days, but it's not the city you remember. Everyone seems just as keen to forget the past as the new rulers did. No one wants to look at you for too long. It was a tragedy, what was done to you, but we weren't the ones to hang you from the tree. Why are you haunting us? You tell them you're not haunting them, you just wanted to see your home, but that doesn't matter. You still aren't welcome there. You're still the same freak they chased away when you were children. You still don't belong.
And throughout all of that, through all the pain and suffering and death, you never stop smiling. You never stop telling jokes and doing arts and crafts and trying new things. You're the happiest person you know, because you have to be. Because you have to believe that the worst thing to happen to you has already happened. And if it hasn't, well... you will outlive them.
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